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Sales 2.0: How Businesses are Using Online
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Sales 2.0: How Businesses are Using Online Collaboration to Spark Sales
Introduction
A new set of business practices are slowly but steadily starting to creep into the way companies
sell their wares to customers. This new trend in selling is being called “Sales 2.0” by some. It’s
an unsophisticated, yet appropriate, moniker for this phenomenon, since many of the tools and
methods that are fueling the Sales 2.0 trend have their roots in the Web 2.0 movement.
Before we focus on Sales 2.0, it is instructive to
examine and to try to define Web 2.0, which we
do later in this paper. Indeed, the definitions of
Web 2.0 and Sales 2.0 are problematic since both
are relatively new phenomena. They are also hard
to define because they are grass roots or bottomup movements, and as such, have very hazy
boundaries. It’s very difficult to determine where
Web 1.0 ends and where Web 2.0 begins and the
same can be said for Sales 1.0 and Sales 2.0.
Web 2.0 is a movement fostered by incremental
improvements in technology and greater
adoption of the Internet which fundamentally
is altering how we live today. It’s changing how
we gather information, how we shop, how we
interact with friends and colleagues and touching
innumerable other facets of our daily lives.
The Impact of Web 2.0 tools in the Work Place
“Our project is very new, and we do not have
measures of improved efficiency yet. Anecdotal
evidence strongly indicates that teams and
workgroups that transition some portion of
their processes to the Enterprise 2.0 portal
see reductions in the volume of status e-mails
and reductions in the number and/or time
spent in standing meetings. This suggests to
us that some of the lowest-hanging fruit in the
adoption of Enterprise 2.0 is the maintenance
of situational awareness.” (more)
August Jackson
Insight Community Expert
One of the central pillars of this movement – if
not the central pillar – is collaboration. Web 2.0
is allowing us to work together and to share information and experiences in ways we never
could before. It is empowering us to convey our thoughts, ideas, hopes and dreams and to make
them easily accessible to others online. In doing so, it’s allowed us to tap into a collective online
wisdom that far surpasses what we could accomplish as individuals in the offline world.
Now businesses are trying to harness some of the same empowering forces of Web 2.0 and to
apply them to their sales and marketing efforts. They know from their Web 2.0 experience that
working collaboratively online will allow them to better understand and connect with their
customers and to market and sell their products and services more easily.
So, what is Sales 2.0?
At its essence, it is the adaptation of Web 2.0 concepts and technologies to improve and
accelerate the sales process. To learn more about what Sales 2.0 is and where this movement is
headed, we tapped three sources of information:
1) We polled sales and marketing professionals through a mini-survey online using
TheCustomerCollective, an online community for sales and marketing executives, to
learn to what extent companies and sales and marketing professionals have adopted
and are using Web 2.0 tools both inside of and outside of their companies for sales and
marketing purposes.
2) We sought feedback from Techdirt Insight Community experts about how they and
their companies are using new collaborative technologies to improve their sales and
marketing efforts.
3) We also pieced together publicly available information from Oracle (a sponsor of The
CustomerCollective and this paper) about several new sales tools which the company
Techdirt Insight Community
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Sales 2.0: How Businesses are Using Online Collaboration to Spark Sales
calls Oracle Social CRM applications. Oracle is designing these tools to boost the power
and efficiency of rank and file salespeople while eliminating the repetitive, low value
tasks such as data entry, which limit the usefulness of first-generation tools.
Here is what we found:
• Sales 2.0 is a bubble-up phenomenon as opposed to the more traditional, top-to-bottom
initiative that is more commonplace in the corporate world. Like Web 2.0, many of the
tools, technologies and techniques of Sales 2.0 are being born of experimentation. Small
companies and a few large ones are taking online consumer applications, tinkering with
them and re-engineering them to suit business purposes.
• Sales 2.0 is in its infancy. It’s clear from every data source we tapped that we’re in the
earliest days of this phenomenon. Users are starting to experiment with collaborative
tools such as blogs, wikis and mash-ups. They’re just beginning to discover how they
can leverage these tools for sales and marketing purposes. And vendors such as Oracle
are just starting to integrate these tools into their offerings in an effort to make their
customers more productive.
• Sales 2.0 is radically reshaping every facet in the process of how companies market and
sell to their customers. It’s helping salespeople do a better job of identifying leads, of
turning leads into opportunities and of converting those opportunities into customer
wins.
Primary Sales 2.0 concepts from Web 2.0
Since the genesis of collaborative Sales 2.0 tools is Web 2.0, it is critical that we explore some
of the key concepts underpinning Web 2.0 and how they relate to Sales 2.0. Web 2.0 is a term
that describes “the use of Worldwide Web technology and Web design that aims to enhance
creativity, information sharing, and most notably, collaboration among users.” That definition
comes from Wikipedia, one of the best examples of the power that online collaboration and
Web 2.0 has unleashed. The definition goes on to note that these concepts have spawned user
generated content in the form of social-networking sites, wikis, blogs and folksonomies (the
practice of collaboratively
creating and managing tags to
annotate and categorize content).
This mash-up integrates crime data from the Chicago Police with Google
Maps to visually represent where the crime rate is high.
Techdirt Insight Community
Another Web 2.0 concept that is
germane to this discussion is the
notion of mash-ups. Mash-ups
merge content from a variety
of different sources to create a
new application which is more
valuable or useful than the sum
of its parts. The form of the
content can take many shapes –
text, graphics, audio, video, and
animation – but the importance
of this Web 2.0 technology is that
it is emblematic of Sales 2.0. It’s a
classic bubble up technology that
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Sales 2.0: How Businesses are Using Online Collaboration to Spark Sales
fosters collaboration among users. The beauty
of the Sales 2.0 movement is that companies can
adapt the best tools and techniques from Web 2.0
and use them for a variety of purposes in very
different ways. Members of the Techdirt Insight
Community explain how their companies are
doing this internally while Oracle’s efforts give
us insight into how one vendor is incorporating
these concepts in an effort to improve the sales
and marketing tools it offers to the marketplace.
Companies are using Sales 2.0 tools to try to
extend traditional networking activities both
inside and outside of the company. The use of
Sales 2.0 tools internally allows employees and
other closed groups, such as channel partners, to
collaborate and share proprietary data and ideas
behind their corporate firewalls. This is akin to a
private conversation. Companies also are using
Sales 2.0 tools externally to reach out and connect
with prospects, customers and others in the
equivalent of public conversations.
Leveraging Web 2.0 to be a better salesperson
“Writing intelligent commentary, adding
notes to people’s profiles, and adding to the
conversation brands a salesperson and allows
prospects and clients to feel they know the
salesperson prior to even the initial call. In my
business, I’m surprised at how often a call turns
into a sale because the client already feels they
know me and what I do. The easiest way to
do this is writing a blog, a spectacular way to
showcase one’s interests and experience as a
thought leader…. This is gold for salespeople.
A well-written blog in the industry is a way to
capture mindshare and set oneself apart from
other salespeople who are seen as cold-calling
pests.” (more)
James Durbin
Insight Community Expert
Different Sales 2.0 tools are best applied to different situations. For instance, because, in
general, a wiki can be modified by any user who has access to it, they are more likely to be
used internally for sharing information between employees within a company and behind a
corporate firewall. By contrast, blogs are more likely to be used outside the firewall because
usually the corporation or bloggers within the corporation control and limit the content posted
to the blog. The blog still is collaborative in that readers may interact in the blog format via
either open or moderated comments.
Survey Findings
Just as Web 2.0 is reshaping how consumers collaborate online, Sales 2.0 is transforming how
companies go about the business of selling to their customers. Our mini-survey targeted
sales and marketing professionals and executives via TheCustomerCollective, a Web site that
caters to sales and marketing professionals. Of the almost 100 respondents who answered our
mini-survey, 44% held a sales role within their company while 39% came from the ranks of
marketing.
Most respondents came from smaller sized companies. Of those surveyed, 70% were from
companies of less than 500 employees, while
about 60% of the total came from companies
Impact of Collaborative Technologies
with under 100 employees. Since Sales 2.0 is a
grass-roots phenomenon, feedback from smaller
8%
9%
companies is important since it gives a better
Not Much
sense of how far this movement has spread
Some
and where it is heading. And because smaller
Very Much
34%
companies have fewer resources and generally
Not Sure
49%
are less restricted by their IT departments as to
what online tools they can use and what Web
sites they can access, they are more likely to be
83% of survey respondents believe social networking tools are
early adopters.
influencing their sales and marketing efforts.
Techdirt Insight Community
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Sales 2.0: How Businesses are Using Online Collaboration to Spark Sales
% of respondents
Sales 2.0 Tools Used by Businesses for External Purposes
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
wikis
blogs
social media
services
external
websites
none of the
above
Companies no longer solely rely on their externally facing websites. Increasingly, they use
blogs to get the message to the marketplace.
Generally, respondents felt that
collaborative online tools were
having an impact on the sales and
marking efforts at their company.
Forty-nine percent of respondents
felt the impact was significant,
while 34% said these tools were
having some positive impact on
their jobs. Contrast that with only
8% of respondents who felt that
collaborative online tools were
having little to no impact on their
jobs.
And while many companies are
using Web 2.0 technologies both internally and externally for sales and marketing purposes,
there still appears to be plenty of room for additional adoption, even among smaller companies.
Less than 20% of companies we surveyed use wikis for internal sales and marketing purposes
while, even fewer -- just one in five -- use blogs internally for sales or marketing. Blogs are
better suited to sales and marketing for external purposes and more popular. Thirty-five percent
of respondents say they use blogs to further their sales and marketing efforts.
Sales 2.0 still in its infancy
Sales 2.0 is in its infancy and still has a long way to go before it permeates corporate America.
Of those surveyed, 30% said they do not use any tools such as blogs, wikis, social media
applications, or even intranet Web sites for sales and marketing purposes inside the company.
And - surprisingly - 12% of our respondents don’t use any of these tools for sales and marketing
outside of the company.
% of respondents
Only 25% of our audience said
Sales 2.0 Tools Used by Businesses for Internal Purposes
they use external social media
100
90
applications such as Facebook,
80
LinkedIn and Twitter as part of
70
their sales and marketing efforts.
60
And an even smaller number
50
40
of companies have started to
30
integrate Sales 2.0 tools internally
20
into their operations. Only 11% of
10
those surveyed said they are using
0
wikis
blogs
social media
intranet
none of the
applications with social elements
services
websites
above
inside of their company. And our
Two out of three respondents have integrated Sales 2.0 tools into their internal
data almost certainly overstates
sales and marketing processes.
the overall adoption of Web
2.0 and Sales 2.0 technologies,
because the survey was targeted at early adopters.
Since the data was collected online via an opt-in survey hosted on TheCustomerCollective, a
blog-driven Web site, respondents tend to be more net savvy and to have had more exposure
to these tools than the general population of sales and marketing professionals. In addition
to coming from predominantly early stage companies, most respondents work in service
oriented business, many of which have an online component to their business. And many
respondents held jobs in technology dependent industries such as information services or
telecommunications sectors, making them more likely to be exposed to and more comfortable
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Sales 2.0: How Businesses are Using Online Collaboration to Spark Sales
with these new tools.
Online Tools Used for Sales and Marketing
To understand how pervasive
90
online technology is used at
80
their companies, we asked
70
respondents which online tools
60
they use for sales and marketing
50
purposes. The results suggest a
40
large number of the respondent
30
20
pool use sophisticated online
10
tools to sell and market to their
0
customers. Of those surveyed,
CRM/SFA Web Conf. Knowledge Prospect & Lead Gen. Doc. & Sig.
Other
63% use CRM/SFA software
Mgmt.
Sales
Mgmt.
Research
while 59% use Web conference
software and services. Forty-five
Usage of traditional online sales tools by respondents is high.
percent use prospect or sales
research services while 39% use
knowledge management tools or portals and 37% use some form of lead generation tools or
services.
% of respondents
100
An impressive 62% of respondents who use social media applications are using LinkedIn for
sales and marketing purposes while 46% are using Facebook. Other Sales 2.0 tools sited in
our survey have yet to see that rate of adoption, but usage of these types of applications will
grow as sales and marketing professionals discover their value. For perspective, 49% of our
respondents use Hoovers, a well-established first generation online sales tool. It is interesting to
note that 41% of LinkedIn users find the tool useful for sales and marketing purposes, slightly
more than the 39% who value Hoovers for its sales and marketing usefulness.
Usefulness of Social Applications for Sales 2.0
Usage of Sales 2.0 applications such as LinkedIn and Facebook are beginning
to approach or to surpass usage of more traditional tools such as Hoovers
Techdirt Insight Community
Hoovers
Altus
InsideView
Echosign
Jigsaw
MySpace
Facebook
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
LinkedIn
Hoovers
Altus
InsideView
Echosign
Jigsaw
MySpace
Facebook
% of respondents
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
LinkedIn
% of respondents
Usageof Social Applications for Sales 2.0
Sales and marketing professionals are starting to find Sales 2.0 tools such as
LinkedIn are more useful than traditional tools such as Hoovers.
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Sales 2.0: How Businesses are Using Online Collaboration to Spark Sales
Case Study: Using Web 2.0 Tools to Sell in Sales 2.0 World
Zack Miller
Insight Community Expert
Sales 2.0 has begun to redefine the traditional sales funnel. Because Web technologies are involved, a
certain level of new automation has crept into the sales process. For me and others competing in today’s
marketplace, Sales 2.0 has done a couple of things: Increase the circumference of the funnel, shortened
cycle times and increased conversions.
Increasing the Circumference of the Funnel
I’m finding that I’m able to get a dramatically greater reach with my marketing efforts, effectively
creating wider and more frequent ways to connect with potential clients. From there, given Sales 2.0
tech and platforms, I’m able to push more people through a wider funnel.
Casting a wider net: Web 2.0 technologies are effectively being
used by sales organizations to build brand over a wider reach.
Companies like mine are using these technologies to build huge
marketing machines in a much softer, gentler, and more precise
way-- via content…. I work with blog aggregation firms like
SeekingAlpha to ramp up my exposure. SeekingAlpha, due to its
content base of hundreds of blogs, has negotiated distribution
deals with Yahoo Finance and E*Trade, deals I could never have
negotiated on my own. Now, my content shows us exactly in front
of the types of people who are my potential clients.
I’m using metrics tools like Google’s plug-and-play Analytics to track
my efforts and in step, I add more marketing/content gas to those
sites providing the best feeders to my core business. Enabling my content with RSS allows me to get my
content out there. Sites like RSS hosting/tracking firm, FeedBurner, allow me to position my content to
become portable and allow users to read my content wherever they may be. As I’m building a Sales 2.0
organization, it’s more important for me to reach a larger audience at this point than it is to drive direct
traffic to my own blog.
Reputation building or becoming an expert: these technologies provide companies and individuals with
the ability to build their own brands in increasingly narrow niches. I run my blog on the WordPress
platform. WordPress has developed an app so that my blog posts also show up on Facebook. Not only
does this further my reach beyond my blog and any aggregators to whom I’m submitting content, it also
gets my content onto Facebook.
I’ve just begun to use Twitter to microblog some of my market commentary during the day. As more and
more mainstream users adopt twitter-like apps, I am sure that this will compete for other media as a way
to build reputation and distribute my expert opinion.
I’m using sites like Vestopia and Stockpickr to increase sales. Both sites allow me to create model
portfolios and submit them to a community of like-minded investors.
I’m using Meetup to plan, manage, and communicate with numerous seminars that I’m holding as a way
to garner new business. All these things are providing mechanisms for me to connect with as many warm
leads as possible and bring them into a process that I can begin to close a proportion of them.
One-to-one sales: Sales 2.0 technologies essentially allow one to widen the mouth of the traditional
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Sales 2.0: How Businesses are Using Online Collaboration to Spark Sales
sales funnel by creating a cheap and wide-reaching distribution network and given the ability to
build brand/reputation along very narrow borders, companies are able to cast their message to the
appropriate audience in a way that was never possible previously. The result is that I’m consistently
marketing to my existing and future customers.
Sales 2.0 is all about relationship marketing. My future clients are reading my content on my blog, on
SeekingAlpha and on Yahoo Finance. The next step in the process is to make the relationship a little
more intimate by soliciting an e-mail address. I accomplish this by using an e-mail services company, like
Constant Contact or StreamSend. These service providers provide hosted e-mail services including easyto-use auto responders.
Making customers into distributors: Sales 2.0, given its integration into the tangle of relationships that is
Web 2.0, has some interesting outcomes. Satisfied customers actually become value-added distributors
for my business. The more users I have tracking my portfolios on Vestopia or Stockpickr (see above), the
more legs my sales and marketing efforts have. In turn, users who track or follow my followers are also
exposed to my content. In turn, what’s occurred, is that my customers or soon-to-be customers reinforce
my positioning as an expert in my field and in turn, act as quasi-distributors lending approbation to my
efforts.
Shorten Cycle Time
I spend most of my time creating content and allow the hooks into various Sales 2.0 platforms to work
their magic. Every article I write shows up on my Facebook profile because I’ve integrated WordPress and
Facebook (see above). My e-mail auto-responders treat every new trial subscription to my research the
same way. A series of personalized, automated messages go out, creating a conversion channel for my
readers. RSS feeds are pushed out automatically via FeedBurner.
The Sales 2.0 funnel is inherently stickier than its predecessors. Potential clients enter my wide-mouth
funnel and have access to my research, my blog, my real-time market commentary. It’s not hit or miss
advertising. Instead, potential clients who don’t buy right away continue to hear, see, and feel my
messages. They stay connected to me longer and instead of just slipping through the funnel, they hang
out for a while. While cycle times are sped up, more conversions actually take place.
To read the complete case study, click here
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Sales 2.0: How Businesses are Using Online Collaboration to Spark Sales
Oracle’s Social CRM Initiative
One company leveraging Web 2.0 technologies and concepts in an effort to improve its products
is Oracle (a sponsor of this paper and TheCustomerCollective Web site). Rank and file sales
people feel CRM has made them less productive because time consuming data entry takes them
away from customer-focused activities. By infusing their products with Web 2.0 functionality,
Oracle hopes to take the emphasis away from reporting and to put it back on selling.
With this in mind, Oracle is developing a new breed of social sales applications designed:
• To be more intuitive,
• To model common tasks sales representatives execute every day
• And to leverage the knowledge and wisdom of collaborative sales communities.
While traditional CRM offerings will continue to be a critical application for organizations to
automate and optimize their sales operations, Oracle Social CRM Applications are intended
specifically for sales users, rather than sales executives, and are designed to provide immediate
benefits while eliminating some of the time-consuming elements associated with CRM,
such as data entry. Ultimately these tools are seen as a key to help sales users increase their
sales effectiveness, or more simply stated, to sell more. This is accomplished through singlefocused applications that are designed to be easy to use, mash up and present data from
disparate sources in visually compelling forms in order to solve business challenges, and
harness collective intelligence across companies or business networks comprising multiple
organizations. The company is developing a family of what it calls Oracle Social CRM
Applications.
Oracle Sales Prospector
The first, called Oracle Sales Prospector, delivers a highly graphical mash-up of internal and
external data sources that help sales people identify the top prospects they should target with
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Sales 2.0: How Businesses are Using Online Collaboration to Spark Sales
specific products or services. The software bases
its recommendations using sophisticated analytics
that identify buying patterns based on purchase
history, suggesting not only potential deals for
a sales representative to pursue, but also the
projected revenue, close probability, and time to
close for each deal predicted.
Oracle Sales Campaigns
Oracle Sales Campaigns allows salespeople
to create and share HTML e-mail campaigns,
and then track and measure their
effectiveness. The idea is that collaborating
on and pooling the best material available
for a campaign benefits the entire sales
team by guiding representatives to those
campaigns that have been most effective
in specific scenarios, such as initiatives
targeted to prospects in a specific industry. In
addition, this application reduces the amount
of repetitive work that each salesperson
normally would undertake in order to
conduct her or his own campaign.
Using Social Media to Connect with Prospects
“Using social media, salespeople can gather indepth, up-to-date, targeted demographic and
contact information that is pre-filtered by the
clients themselves. If a buyer or hiring manager
or decision maker wants to get found, the most
current contact information is the information they
entered in a social network…. Using my [LinkedIn]
network of over 1,400 connections, I can contact
every Fortune 1000 company in the country through
a warm lead, an advantage not easily replicated
even for those with large rolodexes. If a manager
leaves a company, their contact information goes
cold. On LinkedIn, or any of the other networks,
the information changes with the move. What
this means is that you no longer lose contacts
when they leave companies, and have the best
opportunity to know when to contact them about
new business.” (more)
James Durbin
Insight Community Expert
Oracle Sales Library
The idea behind Oracle Sales Library is to
create a single repository of sales materials and to empower users with Web 2.0 tools such as
tagging, rating and reviewing in order to help them determine which assets are most effective.
The aim is to empower an individual salesperson to be able to quickly and easily download
individual slides or an entire presentation to be used for his or her own meetings. Today a sales
user must download an entire presentation from an internal portal, find and select slides to
her or his liking, and then has no way to share the wisdom she or he gained in assembling the
presentation, other than via e-mail.
Other Social Innovations
In addition, Oracle has unveiled a task-based mobile application, Oracle Mobile Sales Assistant,
which eases the ability of sales reps to access critical customer information while on the go. It is
also introducing a series of widgets that expose pertinent customer or sales information on the
user’s desktop or within the portal of her or his choice. This frees the user from having to open a
CRM application in order to access this information.
These applications are all built on Oracle’s standards-based Fusion Middleware platform to
facilitate easy integration with other business applications and to provide the scalability and
security that businesses require.
Conclusion
While the majority of sales and marketing professionals are not yet using social media
applications such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and Jigsaw, for business purposes,
that’s rapidly changing. People are beginning to understand the power of collaboration and
Sales 2.0. Sales and marketing professionals are beginning to see they can use these tools to do
a better job of selling and marketing to their customers. And our research from the Techdirt
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Sales 2.0: How Businesses are Using Online Collaboration to Spark Sales
“Companies considering
Enterprise 2.0 should begin
with considering what it is they
are trying to do as opposed to
thinking of the tool first. At
our company we saw specific
problems with our existing
processes that we believed we
would be able to address with
specific Web 2.0 tools.” (more)
Insight Community shows, sales and marketing professionals
who use these types of tools gain a competitive advantage over
their peers who do not use them. Businesses are starting to see
that wikis make their internal teams more productive while
tools such as blogs help them target and direct their message
externally to customers. And vendors such as Oracle are
seeing that incorporating Sales 2.0 tools and concepts into their
products will empower sales and marketing teams, making
them even more effective.
August Jackson,
Insight Community Expert
Next Steps
• If you are a sales and marketing professional and you are unfamiliar with new social
media services such as Facebook, Jigsaw, LinkedIn or Twitter, you should consider
experimenting with them.
• Once you’ve grown comfortable with Web 2.0 concepts and services, think about how
you can leverage these tools and the concepts into your role and the sales and marketing
process at your company. How can you use them to better identify and target customers,
to expand your sales funnel and to close deals more quickly?
• And if you’d like to learn more about Oracle Social CRM Applications, you can start here.
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